Owning Black Hair

Concentrating on Black women, this chapter examines microaggressions directed at members of this population through and because of their hair. Recognizing higher education as White space, this chapter considers the treatment, instructions, and even backlash that Black women receive as they assert their individual and cultural identities through their hairstyles. This chapter draws upon data collected from 30 Black women affiliated with higher education as students and/or professionals to illustrate how hair microaggressions affect their experiences on campus. The responses provided by these Black women illustrate how their hair attracts attention, has the potential to challenge or conform to White appearance norms, and illuminates higher education continuing to function as White space.

Analyzing University Exploitation of Diversity to Legitimize Hiring Discrimination

This critical race counter-story chronicles a Black woman professor's candidacy for an associate dean position at a predominantly White institution. It is uncommon to hear the voices of those who have been marginalized and disenfranchised in the hiring process at a university. This counter-narrative disrupts the silencing of voices at the margin and challenges the master narrative of the university hiring process by giving voice to a Black woman professor's experience. Using covert racism, the researcher deconstructs the university's actions to operationalize a deficit narrative of her associate dean candidacy, while simultaneously espousing a commitment to diversity by increasing funding to an outreach program for students of color. The chapter concludes with a discussion of self-care. Black feminist thought provides the framework to understand how acts of self-care influenced the self-definition of the Black woman professor.

Praxis of the Teaching Profession

This chapter is an epic look at teachers' paths through teacher education, public school teaching, and teacher educators' work in a regional university. One teacher narrative intersects with the history of the teaching profession, on how this life is shaped and is also shaped by the social construction of an American education. Ideologies of patriarchy, economic development of human capital including the corporate culture in the university are examined. The discussion reveals the everlasting urgency for radicalization in the teaching profession through the illustration of a teacher development of critical consciousness, resistance, and the struggle against the institutionalized disciplined docility in the teaching profession. The examination of life in schools and in the university reveals a dialectic between contradictions of institutional oppression and a teacher's development of pedagogy.

What's Respect Got to Do With It?

In this chapter, drawing from the research of the literature and personal experience, the author intends to analyze the intersectionality of race and gender in relation to respect, as well as explore institutional barriers with regards to respect from colleagues and students in and out of the classroom. Keeping in line with the theme of this edited book, forms of microaggressions will be explored as a way of understanding the impact of discrimination and obstacles to feeling respected by colleagues and students. Suggested strategies for an accommodating environment and an academic fit for women of color will be presented.

Claws and All

Understanding why women are underrepresented in various levels of higher education leadership fields remains an important area of research. In the United States and in many industrialized nations around the world, higher education professions remain male dominated. Explanations for why women of color are not successful or are experiencing difficulty in higher education leadership professions are many and diverse. This chapter seeks to examine the discourse of Black female leaders in a predominantly White institution. The chapter will focus on types of management and communication styles that are disruptive to women of color in leadership as they lead without readily identified support in upper division administration.

The Black One

Some faculty are like father figures to the students. The other younger White males are scholarly and tough but brilliant. Then, there is you, the Black One. Black men are six times as likely to be incarcerated as White men. Hispanic men are 2.3 times as likely. In corrections alone, people of color are overrepresented. This chapter will discuss the disparities in the criminal justice system and why students of color are attracted to the field. Microaggressions in a criminal justice program show up as machismo, as a joke, or even as witty, but never as racist. This chapter will tell the narrative of being a Black woman in a predominately White male department and why Black scholars belong in a criminal justice education.

From PWI to HBCU

Using critical race theory and Freire's theoretical framework of oppression as a guide, this chapter discusses institutionalized oppression through the lens of the chapter's author. She provides a collection of lived experiences in the form of short narratives. These narratives begin with the author's experiences as a Black student at predominantly White institutions (PWIs). The author describes many firsts—the first time she was referred to by a White male classmate as a beneficiary of Affirmative Action as the reason for admission into college and not by her merit, experienced low expectations of her academic ability, was called the N-word, and her first encounter with racial profiling. She then details personal accounts of navigating academia as a Black female faculty member in predominantly White institutions (PWIs), Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU), as well as other organizations. Freire's theoretical framework on oppression guides her reflection and discussion of these Black-on-Black encounters. She ends the chapter with a discussion of actions taken.

Undermining Leadership Effectiveness

This chapter highlights the tactics used by faculty, students, and administrators to undermine the leadership of a minority female hired from a national search to chair an academic department of all-White faculty. The tactics ranged from lack of support from her immediate supervisor to collusion to re-assign this minority female to a lesser position. She also received biased evaluations from faculty and students. This faculty member was able to persevere through self-confidence, through refusing to be intimidated, and through her ability to turn challenges into opportunities to showcase her strength and determination to prevail. At one point, she filed a discrimination complaint. As part of her legacy, she established an annual scholarship in her name for African American education majors matriculating at the institution.

Architects of Change in the Ivory Tower

Although it is critical to foreground discussions about the historical vestiges of racist and sexist ideologies that are embedded in the experiences of contemporary Black women in the academy, it is equally important to highlight the role these women are playing in challenging the existence of these structures. There are a growing number of Black women student affairs administrators and faculty engaging in professional counterspaces as a strategy to re-architect the reality of their lives in the academy. Two such programs in the U.S., the African American Women's Summit (AAWS) and the Sisters of the Academy Research BootCamp (RBC), were created by, for, and about Black women employed in higher education to redress the problematic environments these women encounter in academia. In this chapter, the authors explore how tenets of Black feminist thought (BFT) and collective movement activism are integral to the AAWS and RBC and clarify the role Black women student affairs administrators and faculty engaged in these professional counterspaces are playing as architects of change in the ivory tower.

Molding Me in Their Image

This chapter examines how the paternalistic nature of academia shaped the author's development as a graduate student and as a young professor. Overcoming the oppression of a paternalistic culture is challenging for any woman, but even more so for women of color who are assumed to need even more steering, shaping, and molding. It is ironic that the discipline in which the author chose to pursue advanced studies, sociology, is a discipline that has a core goal of examining and challenging inequality. This, however, does not make it impervious to perpetuating inequality. This chapter examines how long it took to take control of shaping the author's own image and to learn to navigate a culture that is still heavily influenced by patriarchal standards.